Appearance
Discredited Claims
The claim:
The CES Letter presents a series of scientific challenges: scriptures and Church leaders have taught no death before the Fall, a 7,000-year-old earth, a global flood, and a literal Tower of Babel. Science has discredited all of these. "To cling to faith in these areas, where the overwhelming evidence is against it, is willful ignorance, not spiritual dedication."[1]
The framing is deliberate. Stack up the weakest scientific positions any Church leader has ever held, treat them as binding doctrine, and then knock them down. The reader is left with the impression that the Church officially requires belief in a young earth, a planet-covering flood, and a world without pre-Adamic death.
It doesn't.
What has the Church actually committed itself to on these questions?
What counts as doctrine?
This is the threshold question the CES Letter skips entirely. A statement by a Church leader in a talk, a manual, or even a book does not automatically become binding doctrine. The Church has been explicit about this.
The 1931 First Presidency — Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, and Charles W. Nibley — addressed this directly in a memo to the Quorum of the Twelve and other general authorities:
"Leave Geology, Biology, Archaeology and Anthropology, no one of which has to do with the salvation of the souls of mankind, to scientific research, while we magnify our calling in the realm of the Church."[2]
That memo settled a heated dispute between Elder Joseph Fielding Smith, who advocated young-earth creationism, and Elder B.H. Roberts, who accepted an ancient earth. The First Presidency's resolution: "Neither side of the controversy has been accepted as a doctrine at all."[3]
This is not a fringe interpretation. BYU's Board of Trustees approved an Evolution Packet in 1992 that compiled every First Presidency statement on the origin of man, and distributed it to faculty precisely to clarify the boundary between doctrine and opinion.[4]
The doctrinal commitments are narrow:
- God is the Creator.
- Adam and Eve are real, historical figures.
- Humans are literal children of God.
- The Fall was a real event with real consequences.
The mechanism of creation, the age of the earth, and the geographic scope of the flood? The Church has never issued a binding declaration on any of them.
Claim 1: No death before the Fall
The CES Letter argument:
"2 Nephi 2:22 and Alma 12:23-24 state there was no death of any kind... It is scientifically established that there has been life and death on this planet for billions of years."[1:1]
The fossil record is unambiguous. Life has existed on this planet for billions of years, and death has been part of it the entire time. No serious scientist disputes this, and no serious Latter-day Saint scholar claims the fossil record is fabricated.
The real question is what the scriptures are actually saying.
2 Nephi 2:22 reads: "All things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end." Read in context, Lehi is making a theological argument about why the Fall was necessary — not issuing a scientific treatise on paleontology. The scope of "all things" is the subject of genuine interpretive debate among faithful scholars.[5]
Elder James E. Talmage — an apostle and trained geologist — addressed this head-on in his 1931 Tabernacle address "The Earth and Man," which the Church printed in the Deseret News and distributed as a pamphlet:
"The whole series of chalk deposits and many of our deep-sea limestones contain the skeletal remains of animals. These lived and died, age after age, while the earth was yet unfit for human habitation."[6]
Talmage explicitly affirmed death before the Fall as a geological fact — and the Church published the talk. He also stated plainly: "The opening chapters of Genesis... were never intended as a textbook of geology, archaeology, earth-science or man-science."[6:1]
On the other side, Elder Joseph Fielding Smith argued for no death of any kind before the Fall. Both men were apostles. Neither view was canonized.
The 1931 First Presidency memo resolved this by declining to resolve it — instructing leaders to leave the question to science and stop treating either position as doctrine.[2:1]
For a deeper treatment of how evolution and the Fall relate, see Evolution & the Fall.
Bottom line: The fossil record is clear. The Church has never required members to deny it. Two apostles held opposite views on death before the Fall, and the First Presidency told both sides to stand down.
Claim 2: The age of the earth
The CES Letter argument:
The CES Letter cites the Bible Dictionary's "Chronology of the Old Testament," which places the Fall of Adam at "4000 B.C.," and D&C 77:6, which references "seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence."[1:2]
The Bible Dictionary includes this disclaimer in its introduction:
"Many of the entries draw on the encyclopedias and dictionaries that were part of the 1979 LDS Bible... The items have been written by various scholars and are subject to reevaluation as new research or revelation comes to light."[7]
The "4000 B.C." date comes from Archbishop James Ussher's 17th-century chronology, which is based on adding up biblical genealogies. It was inserted into KJV margins by publishers and absorbed into reference materials. It is not a revealed date.
D&C 77:6 is more interesting. It describes "the seven thousand years of its continuance, or its temporal existence." The Church's own institute manual clarifies: "These seven thousand years do not include the period of our planet's creation and preparation as a dwelling place for man. They are limited to Earth's 'temporal existence.'"[8]
"Temporal existence" is not "total existence." The scripture is compatible with an ancient earth — the 7,000 years mark the period since Adam, not the planet's total age.
Brigham Young said it plainly in 1871:
"Whether the Lord found the earth empty and void, whether he made it out of nothing or out of the rude elements; or whether he made it in six days or in as many millions of years, is and will remain a matter of speculation in the minds of men unless he give revelation on the subject."[9]
He wasn't hedging. He was explicitly leaving room for geological timescales — and noting that geologists "have good reason for their faith" in an ancient earth.[9:1]
The Church has no official position on the age of the earth.[10]
Bottom line: The "4000 B.C." date is Ussher's chronology, not revelation. D&C 77:6 refers to earth's "temporal existence," which the Church's own manuals distinguish from its total age. Brigham Young openly acknowledged millions of years as a possibility in 1871.
Claim 3: Neanderthals and hominid species
The CES Letter argument:
"If Adam and Eve are the first humans, how do we explain the dozen or so other Hominid species who lived and died 35,000 - 2.4 million years before Adam?"[1:3]
And:
"How do I have pre-Adamic Neanderthal DNA and Neanderthal blood circulating my veins when this species died off about 33,000 years before Adam and Eve?"[1:4]
The fossil record of hominid species is well-established. Modern humans carry approximately 1–4% Neanderthal DNA, inherited through interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago.[11] This is settled science.
The CES Letter assumes this is a devastating problem for Latter-day Saint theology. It's a genuine question — one of the harder ones in the science-religion space — but it's not one the Church has committed to a single answer on.
President Spencer W. Kimball acknowledged in 1976: "We don't know exactly how their coming into this world happened."[12] The 1909 First Presidency statement declared that humans are "the direct and lineal offspring of Deity" — a claim about divine parentage, not a claim about the mechanism of physical creation.[13]
A 1910 Improvement Era editorial, approved by the First Presidency, listed multiple possibilities for the physical origin of Adam and Eve's bodies — including development from lower forms — without endorsing any one of them.[14]
The relationship between Adam, pre-Adamic hominids, and modern genetics is genuinely unresolved in Latter-day Saint theology. That's worth saying honestly. But "unresolved" is different from "discredited." The Church has never committed itself to a position that Neanderthals force it to abandon.
For the related question of whether DNA evidence disproves the Book of Mormon's claims about Native American ancestry, see DNA.
Bottom line: Neanderthal DNA is real. The Church has never issued a binding statement on how Adam's physical body was created or how pre-Adamic hominids fit into the picture. This is an open question, not a refuted doctrine.
Claim 4: The global flood
The CES Letter argument:
"Global flood: 4,500 years ago."[1:5]
The CES Letter treats a literal, planet-covering flood as settled Church doctrine. It isn't.
Elder John A. Widtsoe, an apostle and university president, wrote in 1943:
"The fact remains that the exact nature of the flood is not known. We set up assumptions, based upon our best knowledge, but can go no further."[15]
Some Church leaders have described the flood in global terms — and not just in passing. Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, and John Taylor each described it as the "baptism of the earth," a framing that implies total immersion.[16] That's not easy to dismiss. These were prophets and apostles speaking in official capacities.
But other leaders have taken a different view, and the range is wider than the CES Letter lets on.
The Hebrew word translated "earth" in the Genesis flood narrative is eretz, which can mean "land," "country," or "ground" — not necessarily the entire planet.[17] Ancient Israelite cosmology envisioned a flat earth under a dome-shaped firmament. The concept of a planetary globe "did not appear in Jewish thought until the fourteenth or fifteenth century."[18] When Genesis says the flood covered "all the earth," the original audience would have understood this as "all the land" — their known world.
A regional flood that devastated an entire civilization and seemed to cover the whole visible world would be described by its survivors in exactly the language Genesis uses. The Black Sea hypothesis, developed since the late 1990s, proposes that a catastrophic flooding event occurred when rising ocean levels breached the Bosporus shelf, rapidly inundating the freshwater lake that once occupied the Black Sea basin and destroying all settlements along its shores.[19]
The "baptism of the earth" teaching is the strongest case for a global reading, and it deserves honest acknowledgment. But baptism language can function metaphorically — the earth being "cleansed" by water doesn't necessarily require that every square mile was submerged any more than the biblical language of God "destroying all flesh" requires the extinction of all species.
The theological point of the flood narrative — God's judgment, Noah's obedience, the covenant after — doesn't depend on whether the water reached Antarctica.
Bottom line: The Church has never defined whether the flood was global or regional. The Hebrew text is compatible with a local reading. The theological meaning of the narrative doesn't hinge on its geographic scope.
Claim 5: The Tower of Babel and the Jaredites
The CES Letter argument:
"Tower of Babel: (a staple story of the Jaredites in the Book of Mormon)."[1:6]
This is the sharpest version of the science challenge because the Book of Ether anchors the Jaredite civilization to the Tower of Babel narrative. If the Tower of Babel is pure fiction, does the Book of Mormon collapse?
No. For several reasons.
The Book of Mormon doesn't depend on a literal reading of Genesis. The book of Ether reports that the Jaredites left from "the great tower" at a time when languages were confounded (Ether 1:33). It doesn't require that every detail of the Genesis 11 account be read as a modern historical report. Ancient peoples routinely anchored their histories to well-known origin narratives — the Jaredites connecting their departure to the Tower story is what you'd expect from an ancient Near Eastern record, whether the Tower account is literal history, theological narrative, or something in between.[20]
Massive Mesopotamian ziggurats did exist. The ancient city of Babylon contained Etemenanki, a massive stepped tower that has been identified by archaeologists as a plausible referent for the Tower of Babel tradition. The narrative isn't spun from nothing — it's anchored in a real architectural and cultural tradition.[21]
The "confounding of languages" has faithful non-literal readings. The Hebrew word balal ("to confuse") is the basis for a wordplay on "Babel." Some scholars read the narrative as a theological polemic against Babylonian imperial ambition rather than a literal account of the origin of all human languages. The Brother of Jared's people could have experienced a real displacement event — political, social, or migratory — that the Nephite record later described using the familiar Tower framework.[22]
Moroni is summarizing, not transcribing. The book of Ether is Moroni's abridgment of a record that had already been translated by King Mosiah. It's a summary of a summary. Moroni shaped the Jaredite narrative using frameworks he knew — including the brass plates' version of the Tower story. The core historical claim — that a group of people migrated from Mesopotamia to the Americas — doesn't require that every etiological detail in the framing be read as literal science.[23]
The Tower of Babel is a real interpretive challenge. But the CES Letter's framing — science has "discredited" it, therefore the Book of Mormon falls — is an overreach. The Book of Mormon's historical claims about the Jaredites don't depend on a particular reading of Genesis 11.
Bottom line: The Book of Ether anchors the Jaredites to the Tower narrative, but doesn't require a strictly literal reading of Genesis 11. Massive ziggurats existed in ancient Babylon. The historical core of the Jaredite migration doesn't stand or fall with the linguistics of the Tower account.
Noah's Ark and animal speciation
The CES Letter argument:
"Noah's Ark: Humans and animals having their origins from Noah's family and the animals contained in the ark 4,500 years ago. It is scientifically impossible, for example, for the bear to have evolved into several species... from Noah's time just a few thousand years ago."[1:7]
The CES Letter is correct that all bear species did not diverge from a common ancestor within the last 4,500 years. That timeline is scientifically impossible.[24]
But this objection only works if the Church requires belief in a global flood with every land animal species aboard a single vessel. As addressed above, it doesn't. A regional flood with a representative collection of local livestock is compatible with both the Hebrew text and the theological purpose of the narrative.
Joseph Fielding Smith described Noah saving "all living things," but John Widtsoe described a flood of uncertain scope. The Church has not issued a binding statement requiring the young-earth-creationist version of the Ark story.
The pattern: opinion treated as doctrine
The CES Letter's science section works by a single rhetorical move: find the most scientifically problematic statement a Church leader has ever made, present it as official doctrine, and then show that science contradicts it.
This would be devastating if the Church operated the way the CES Letter assumes — with every statement by every leader carrying the weight of revealed truth. It doesn't.
The Church itself has drawn this line repeatedly:
| Year | Source | Statement |
|---|---|---|
| 1871 | Brigham Young | "Whether he made it in six days or in as many millions of years, is and will remain a matter of speculation"[9:2] |
| 1909 | First Presidency | Declared humans are "children of God" — silent on the mechanism of creation[13:1] |
| 1910 | Improvement Era (FP-approved) | Listed multiple possible physical origins for Adam's body without endorsing one[14:1] |
| 1931 | First Presidency memo | "Leave Geology, Biology, Archaeology and Anthropology... to scientific research"[2:2] |
| 1931 | James E. Talmage (Apostle) | Affirmed death before the Fall and an ancient earth in a Church-published address[6:2] |
| 1943 | John A. Widtsoe (Apostle) | "The exact nature of the flood is not known"[15:1] |
| 1976 | Spencer W. Kimball (President) | "We don't know exactly how their coming into this world happened"[12:1] |
| 1992 | BYU Board of Trustees | Approved and distributed the Evolution Packet to faculty[4:1] |
| 2016 | Church History topic | "The Church has no official position on the theory of evolution"[25] |
That's not a church scrambling to keep up with science. That's a pattern of institutional restraint on questions the scriptures don't settle — going back to 1871.
The positive case: intelligence as a religious value
The CES Letter's framing assumes that science and Latter-day Saint theology are fundamentally at war. The actual history runs the other direction.
D&C 93:36 reads: "The glory of God is intelligence." D&C 88:118 instructs members to "seek learning, even by study and also by faith." D&C 130:18–19 teaches that "whatever principle of intelligence we attain unto in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection."
These aren't throwaway verses. They represent a theological commitment to learning that is unusual among religious traditions. The Church doesn't just tolerate scientific inquiry — its scriptures frame the pursuit of knowledge as a form of worship.
A university that teaches evolution
BYU — the Church's flagship university — has a biology department that teaches evolution as standard science. The 1992 Evolution Packet was created because faculty were already teaching it and students needed clarity that this was permitted.[4:2] BYU has produced research in genetics, paleontology, and geology that assumes an ancient earth and evolutionary processes. The Church funds this.
Faithful scientists, past and present
Henry Eyring — father of President Henry B. Eyring — was one of the twentieth century's foremost chemists, known for the Eyring equation in chemical kinetics. He was a devout Latter-day Saint who wrote The Faith of a Scientist (1967), arguing that "there can never be any genuine contradictions between true science and true religion."[26]
James E. Talmage held a PhD in geology. John A. Widtsoe was a chemist. Joseph F. Merrill was an engineer. Russell M. Nelson was a pioneering heart surgeon. Richard G. Scott was a nuclear engineer. The Quorum of the Twelve has repeatedly included trained scientists who saw no conflict between their faith and their disciplines.[27]
The ability to produce both a James E. Talmage and a Joseph Fielding Smith — and let both speak — is not a weakness. It's a feature of a church that distinguishes between revealed doctrine and individual interpretation.
Every religious tradition has this tension
The CES Letter treats this as a uniquely Mormon problem. It isn't.
Catholic leaders defended geocentrism until the evidence became overwhelming. Protestant fundamentalists fought evolution through the Scopes trial and continue to do so. Islamic scholars debate Quranic cosmology. Every tradition that makes claims touching the physical world eventually encounters moments where older interpretations collide with new evidence.
The question isn't whether a religious tradition has ever held a scientifically outdated view. Of course it has. The question is whether it has the theological resources to course-correct without abandoning its core commitments.
Latter-day Saint theology has those resources. A belief in continuing revelation means the Church is not permanently locked into any 19th-century scientific assumption. The 1931 First Presidency's instruction to leave science to scientists is itself an act of continuing revelation — a prophetic recognition that these questions belong to a different domain.[2:3]
Bottom line: The CES Letter treats individual leader opinions as binding doctrine, then shows that science contradicts them. But the Church has spent over 150 years distinguishing between revealed truth and scientific speculation — and explicitly telling its members that geology, biology, and anthropology belong to science, not theology.
The course-correction is the feature
The CES Letter presents a church caught flat-footed by science — clinging to outdated claims because it can't adapt. The actual record shows the opposite.
As early as 1871, Brigham Young acknowledged that the earth might be millions of years old. In 1931, an apostle affirmed the fossil record from the Tabernacle pulpit and the Church published it. That same year, the First Presidency told its leaders to stop fighting about evolution. In 1992, BYU formalized the Church's scientific neutrality for its faculty. In 2016, the Church published a history topic page stating plainly that it has "no official position on the theory of evolution."[25:1]
That trajectory — from open acknowledgment, to institutional restraint, to formal neutrality — is what a healthy institution looks like when navigating the intersection of faith and science. The CES Letter wants you to see rigidity. The record shows flexibility anchored to core commitments.
The core commitments haven't moved: God is the Creator, humans are his children, the Fall was real, and Christ's Atonement answers the Fall. Everything else — the timelines, the mechanisms, the scope of the flood — the Church has consistently treated as open territory.
Henry Eyring put it best: "Since the Gospel embraces all truth, there can never be any genuine contradictions between true science and true religion... I am obliged, as a Latter-day Saint, to believe whatever is true, regardless of the source."[26:1]
Bottom line: The Church's ability to distinguish between core doctrine and scientific speculation — and to leave science to scientists — is a strength, not a vulnerability. The CES Letter mistakes institutional humility for institutional failure.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Science," pp. 110–111. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
First Presidency (Heber J. Grant, Anthony W. Ivins, Charles W. Nibley), memo to the Council of the Twelve, the First Council of Seventy, and the Presiding Bishopric, 5 April 1931. Quoted in William E. Evenson and Duane E. Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution: The Authoritative LDS Statements (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2005), 75. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
First Presidency memo, 5 April 1931. The memo resolved a dispute between Elder Joseph Fielding Smith and Elder B.H. Roberts on the question of pre-Adamic death and the age of the earth. See Evenson and Jeffery, Mormonism and Evolution, 53–80. ↩︎
"Evolution and the Origin of Man," BYU Board of Trustees–approved packet, 1992. Compiled by William E. Evenson. Includes the 1909, 1925, and 1931 First Presidency statements and the Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry on evolution. https://biology.byu.edu/00000172-29e6-d079-ab7e-69efe5890000/byu-evolution-packet ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Death Before the Fall," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Death_before_the_Fall ↩︎
James E. Talmage, "The Earth and Man," address delivered in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, 9 August 1931. Published in the Deseret News, 21 November 1931, and reprinted as a Church pamphlet. Reprinted in The Interpreter Foundation. https://interpreterfoundation.org/reprint-sm1-12-the-earth-and-man/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Bible Dictionary," introduction, in The Holy Bible (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2013). The introduction notes that entries are "subject to reevaluation" and "do not necessarily represent the official position of the Church." ↩︎
Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual (2017), chapter 29: Doctrine and Covenants 77–80. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/doctrine-and-covenants-student-manual-2017/chapter-29-doctrine-and-covenants-77-80 ↩︎
Brigham Young, 14 May 1871, Journal of Discourses 14:116. "Whether the Lord found the earth empty and void, whether he made it out of nothing or out of the rude elements; or whether he made it in six days or in as many millions of years, is and will remain a matter of speculation in the minds of men unless he give revelation on the subject." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Age of the Earth," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Age_of_the_Earth ↩︎
Richard E. Green et al., "A Draft Sequence of the Neandertal Genome," Science 328, no. 5979 (2010): 710–722. The study demonstrated that non-African modern humans carry approximately 1–4% Neanderthal DNA. ↩︎
Spencer W. Kimball, "The Blessings and Responsibilities of Womanhood," Ensign, March 1976. ↩︎ ↩︎
"The Origin of Man," First Presidency (Joseph F. Smith, John R. Winder, Anthon H. Lund), Improvement Era 13, no. 1 (November 1909): 75–81. Declared that "all men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother, and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity." ↩︎ ↩︎
Improvement Era editorial, approved by the First Presidency, 1910. Listed multiple possible explanations for the physical origin of Adam and Eve's bodies, including natural development, transplantation, and mortal birth, without endorsing any one position. ↩︎ ↩︎
John A. Widtsoe, Evidences and Reconciliations (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1943), 127. "The fact remains that the exact nature of the flood is not known. We set up assumptions, based upon our best knowledge, but can go no further." ↩︎ ↩︎
Brigham Young (1860), Orson Pratt (1880), and John Taylor (1884) each described the flood as the "baptism of the earth." See "Global or Local Flood/Statements," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Science_and_the_Church_of_Jesus_Christ/Global_or_local_Flood/Statements ↩︎
The Hebrew eretz (אֶרֶץ) appears over 2,500 times in the Old Testament with meanings ranging from "earth" (the planet) to "land," "ground," "country," or "territory." See Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996), s.v. eretz. ↩︎
Duane E. Jeffery, "Noah's Flood: Modern Scholarship and Mormon Traditions," Sunstone 134 (October 2004): 27–45. Jeffery discusses ancient Israelite cosmology and the Hebrew text of the flood narrative. ↩︎
William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah's Flood: The New Scientific Discoveries About the Event That Changed History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). The Black Sea hypothesis proposes a catastrophic flooding event c. 5600 BC when the Mediterranean breached the Bosporus. ↩︎
Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert; The World of the Jaredites; There Were Jaredites (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1988). Nibley distinguished the Jaredite "great tower" from later Tower of Babel traditions and placed it in a broader ancient Near Eastern context. ↩︎
Andrew R. George, "The Tower of Babel: Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts," Archiv für Orientforschung 51 (2005/2006): 75–95. Etemenanki was a massive ziggurat in ancient Babylon associated with the Tower of Babel tradition. ↩︎
"Is the Tower of Babel Historical or Mythological?" FAIR, 2 November 2014. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2014/11/02/fair-issues-73-is-the-tower-of-babel-historical-or-mythological ↩︎
John L. Sorenson, Mormon's Codex: An Ancient American Book (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2013). Sorenson discusses Jaredite migration patterns and the relationship between the book of Ether and ancient Near Eastern texts. ↩︎
The ursid family (bears) diverged from a common ancestor approximately 5–6 million years ago. See Axel Janke et al., "The Mitogenomic Contributions to Bear Phylogeny," Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 80 (2014): 227–234. ↩︎
"Organic Evolution," Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/organic-evolution ↩︎ ↩︎
Henry Eyring, The Faith of a Scientist (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1967), 12, 31. Eyring was one of the twentieth century's foremost theoretical chemists, known for the Eyring equation in chemical kinetics. He was the father of President Henry B. Eyring. ↩︎ ↩︎
James E. Talmage (PhD, geology), John A. Widtsoe (PhD, chemistry), Joseph F. Merrill (PhD, physics/engineering), Russell M. Nelson (MD, cardiac surgery), Richard G. Scott (nuclear engineering). See "Latter-day Saint Apostles and Science," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Mormonism_and_science ↩︎